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Tangled tape turns to trickery in clever video illusion

What can you do with a few dozen yards of magnetic tape? Well, if you're Youtube optical-illusion auteur "brusspup," you can use it to create a stunning visual trick.

What brusspup has done is to lay out the tape in an elongated pattern that, from above, doesn't look like much. But when you lower your perspective closer to the ground, the image seems to squeeze until it becomes something recognizable. The effect, known as "anamorphosis," has been understood since at least the Renaissance and is still used in various sidewalk illustrations, like this one featured in our Optical Illusions page.